Commentary
Dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
When I started Black Kos I had two goals in mind. First, to prevent the balkanization of the Blogosphere. While some people thought creating a "Black Kos thread" would increase balkanization I disagreed. My thinking was that if "information is the slayer of ignorance" creating a thread could help slay ignorance. By "ignorance" I mean more in the classical sense of the word, where people aren't knowledgeable on a topic. I read too many diaries where someone pissed of a person of color by writing something that was deeply insulting. But the sad part was they didn’t mean to insult the person. On the other hand the person of color took it as an attack, assuming malice. I though that by sharing news items, a few pithy comments, maybe I could educate people.
(dopper0189 con't)
Since many bloggers are the vanguard of the progressive movement, the people who will canvass, write and speak to and for Democrats, I thought it would be great if they could relate better to the most loyal voters in the Democratic coalition. If a Black Kos reader/canvasser was confronted by someone who them asked "what do you know about my reality", they would at least have a better leg to stand on. I think we at Black Kos are doing OK here.
The second goal of my goals was to create a space where we could finally have real conversations on race. I mean if we as progressives can’t do that what hope does America have? The reason I am bring this up now is because I have been thinking of a story I read a while back. The recent racial turn of the democratic contest brought me back to it. Incident, Reaction, Forget, Repeat: Formulaic Entertainment Replaces Serious Discussion on Race.
Has racial conflict become amusement? Is the conversation about racism mere entertainment, dialogue rendered for show, inflammatory words tossed back and forth over a racial divide to excite an audience?
Thousands of black people are marooned after Hurricane Katrina amid government paralysis, and the race debate on TV kicks into overdrive. A black woman accuses some white men of rape at a Duke University party and the inflamed rhetoric flies.
I would add the recent turn in democratic primary to this chain of events, or more specifically, the media's "spin" on it.
And with each episode in the long-running Saga of Race in America, a string of characters lines up to react to the latest eruption. The media records them as they take up positions in the Great Race Debate. The media stokes the discussion as self-proclaimed black leaders scream outrage while opponents -- often white, sometimes black -- scream counter-outrage. The "colorblind" wonder why we all just can't get along. And the rest of us watch from ringside, rooting for one camp or another, sometimes in silence.
Then inevitably, the media turns away. The outrage fades. The talking heads go silent. The curtain falls, and the debate recedes to wherever it goes until the next eruption.
Which raises the question: Has the debate over race become a melodrama? A bad television soap opera? A theatrical stage play with complex issues boiled down to a script? Entertaining words thrown around simply to satisfy the 24-hour news cycle, the blogosphere?
I promise this isn't habitual. Time just wasn't my friend this week, so I'll continue the education series next week. I've been helping my brother with his graduation preparation and the cookout afterward. He graduates this Saturday and will be receiving his bachelors in Business Administration. Woo Hoo (Sephius1)
Well it's about time that online Black activism ist starting to get noticed. I am a member of both
ColorofChange.org because I believe in them, and the NAACP (more out of old loyalty) but only the COC really INSPIRES me.
Washingtion Post ≫ Critics of Old Guard Take Black Activism Online
The new black revolution, as singer Gil Scott-Heron famously predicted, is not being televised. It is raging online. A growing cadre of young black activists is using the Internet in an attempt to eclipse traditional civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and hit the refresh button on the civil rights movement. Bloggers with names such as the Cruel Secretary, and blogs called What About Our Daughters? and the African American Political Pundit, have railed against groups in the 'black-o-sphere,' saying they do not understand young black Americans, are behind the times and react too slowly to incidents involving the younger generation.
The leaders of the fledgling movement -- Van Jones and James Rucker of ColorOfChange.org -- may not be familiar to many, but their work is. They circulated a letter and a petition last week promising that the Democrats will pay a 'political price' if they overturn the will of black and young voters and choose Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y) as the party's nominee over Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.).
Jones and Rucker were also the first to successfully raise awareness about the cases of six black teenagers initially charged with attempted murder for beating a white classmate in Jena, La. The campaign led to one of the largest civil rights marches in the South in recent years.
Blogger Gina McCauley, 32, who is organizing the first conference of nonwhite bloggers this summer in Atlanta, said that what Jones and Rucker have started 'can potentially become a new Niagara movement,' a reference to the small contingent of black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois, who met near Niagara Falls in 1905 to form an organization to oppose segregation. The organization eventually became the NAACP....... More ►
The very title of this article is illustrates part of whats wrong with old line civil rights orgs, and black political organization. What Sen. Obama has created is a 'money train'. Looking at like that is what turns off Americans. It is a sign that people are willing to commit to something bigger then themselves. Give people a reason to sacrifice a part of themselves and they will, act like they should give you money and they won't.
Ebony / Jet ≫ The Obama money train, Could Black Organizations Take a Lesson and Duplicate His Success?
As Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination sets record after record in money-raising, leaders of traditional civil rights organizations, social service agencies and other groups that serve African-Americans must be asking themselves whether the financial spigots Obama has discovered can be turned on for them. Interviews with a number of Obama’s financial supporters, including large donors and small ones, suggest that the answer is almost certainly "No."
"A big part of Sen. Obama’s success is a phenomenal candidate," said Tony West, a partner with the San Francisco law firm Morrison & Foerster, who is also one of Obama’s five campaign finance co-chairs for the state of California. "If you take him out of the equation, it’s not clear that you’re going to be successful."
"I think it would scare me if the Obama campaign attempted to mobilize their broad base of support for purely African-American causes, because I think that what brought a lot of people to the table in the first place is that there was no mention of his race," said Che Hashim, a 27-year old lawyer in San Francisco who has contributed $250 to Obama’s campaign. "I think that would be off-putting to a lot of the broad-based support."
Obama’s ability to raise money is unprecedented in American political history. As of April 21, he had raised more than $240 million, more than any other candidate, Democratic or Republican, in the 2008 contest. His monthly receipts have been staggering: $32 million in January, $55 million in February, $41 million in March. Earlier this month, his campaign issued a special appeal to online contributors and raised more than $1 million in one minute...... More ►
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The Root ≫ The Trouble With Transcending Race
They both have unique names and amazing life stories. They have legions of adoring fans who find them inspiring. They have sold millions of books and can fill stadiums like rock stars.
Few black Americans have occupied the rarified status of Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, two 'racially transcendent' blacks whom white admirers find appealing and admirable. But it seems the pedestals on which the 'Double-O's' have been perched are very wobbly these days. Pennsylvania shined an ugly light on Obama's very real problem with white working-class voters. And, since she endorsed him, Oprah's approval ratings with her adoring white public have dipped, too.
Could it be that because of unpleasant and race-loaded issues like the 'scary' and 'angry' Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Oprah went to his church, too), flag pins and uppity comments about 'bitter' white voters, that Oprah and Obama no longer seem so special or different from, you know, other black people? Are they starting to seem kind of ordinary black?...... More ►
Washington Post ≫ Methodists Struggle To Reflect Diversity
Once the epitome of Main Street, U.S.A., the United Methodist Church is rapidly becoming an increasingly international family.
Put another way: The church of President Bush and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is also the church of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. And as the Liberian president stood before thousands of fellow Methodists here Tuesday, she presented herself as the personification of the church's global missions and urged a renewed effort to fight poverty in Africa.
Sirleaf, who in 2006 became Africa's first democratically elected female head of state, pointed to Methodists' centuries-old health and education ministries in her West African nation. Methodists built the first secondary school in Liberia, the College of West Africa, of which Sirleaf called herself a proud alumna.
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NYTimes ≫ A Georgia Community With an African Feel Fights a Wave of Change
When Wevonneda Minis first came to this marshy barrier island where her ancestors had been rice-cultivating slaves, she learned of the dream her great-great-grandfather, Liberty Handy, had the night before he died. In the dream, people told her, a black cat scratched him.
The handing down of stories like that through the generations lies at the very marrow of life here among the rutted dirt roads and palmetto fronds of Hog Hammock, a community of about 400 acres, some 50 mostly elderly people and one store. Here, people remember the last time someone was bit by a snake (40-odd years ago) or called the midwife out of retirement (1968). They know the origin of the island’s odd place names — Behavior Cemetery, Nanny Goat Beach.
Reachable only by boat or ferry, Hog Hammock is one of the last settlements of the Geechee people, also called the Gullah, who in the days before air-conditioning and bug repellent had the Sea Islands virtually to themselves and whose speech and ways, as a result, retained a distinctly African flavor. But now, the island has been discovered by speculators and wealthy weekenders....... More ►
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When it comes to black women and breast cancer, there is a thorny tangle of questions.
The Root ≫ Environment, Genetics or Both?
Last year, when 'Good Morning America' anchor Robin Roberts found a lump in her breast during a self-exam, her first thought was: This can't be; I'm too young! Yes, at 46, Roberts was younger than age 55, when two out of three invasive breast cancers are diagnosed. But she's also black.
Though African-Americans are less likely than white women to get breast cancer, when we do get it, the disease strikes younger and is more deadly. And black women have a higher risk of developing and dying from breast cancer than Asian, Hispanic or Native American women.
More chilling, over the past several years, many studies have shown that compared to other women, African-American women are more frequently diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer that resists some kinds of treatment. This type of tumor also occurs at younger ages, often before age 35. Last summer, researchers at the University of North Carolina identified a specific, virulent breast cancer tumor that strikes young black women 10 times more often than either white women or even older black women. Moreover, our tumors are generally diagnosed and treated later in the game, which makes them especially dangerous....... More ►
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This a great story from from Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, Spiegel & Grau (2008). 'How the summer of '88 became my generation's greatest.'
The Root ≫ Hip-Hop's Daisy Age
My older brother, Big Bill was a disciple of the Golden Years—a kid who knew the difference between Jock Box and the original DMX, a kid who could speak on the wonder of Jazzy Jeff pulling transformers and bird-songs from black vinyl. In those days, to be a black boy was to beg your parents for a set of Technic 1200s turntables and an MPC sampler. Failing that, it meant banging on lunch tables and beat-boxing until you could rock the Sanford & Son theme song and play.
Deep in the basement of West Baltimore, Bill stood in his homeboy Marlon's basement holding the mic like a lover. They called themselves the West Side Kings, which meant Marlon cutting breakbeats and Bill reciting battle rhymes he'd scrawled in a yellow notepad. He would come home with demos, play them for hours, and rap along with himself. This went on for two years before I saw the West Side Kings in action. By then the game had changed, and brothers had gotten righteous. That was the summer of 1988—the greatest season of my generation.
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PBS looks at the life of Marvin Gaye. A true legend.
PBS ≫ Between Genius and Tragedy
His upbringing was tumultous. His father was a pentecoastal minister who cross-dressed. He never gave Marvin the attention and approval he sought. Instead, his father filled him with tales of fire and brimstone, feeding Marvin’s internal war with the sacred and secular. It appears that he used drugs, alcohol and rolled with entourages to shield him from those demons. That didn’t work because his demons hit too close to home. Jeanne Gay (Marvin added an "e" to his last name), Marvin’s sister, is especially candid, recounting their childhoods and Marvin’s clashes with their father. It’s easy to see why Marvin was a mama’s boy and how his mother’s words, that he would one day be a sta,r nourished him. As for his father, regardless of the circumstances surrounding he and Marvin’s fatal clash, it’s hard to comprehend how any father could shoot his son dead. The fact that it occurred April 1, 1984, a day before Marvin’s 45th birthday, makes it all the more perplexing.
That’s what feeds Marvin’s legend, his story. Although we are never in suspense as to how this story will end, we are shocked and saddened all over again. Perhaps because we still hear all the beautiful music: "Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing Baby" and all those other duets he did with Tammi Terrell that a generation fell in love with and to. We feel Marvin’s loss when a brain tumor kills Terrell at age 24, when she was still so full of love and life to give. We feel his outrage at the Vietnam War and all war for that matter, mainly because we find ourselves nearly 40 years later still asking, ‘What’s Going On.’ When he switched our focus once again to making love instead of war, we couldn’t wait to "get it on" with him. We can’t fathom, even as Mary Wilson tells the story, that he worried whether "Sexual Healing," a huge comeback single for him, would hit or not....... More ►
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The Root ≫ Treasure trove found in 500-year-old shipwreck off Africa
The ship was laden with tons of copper ingots, elephant tusks, gold coins — and cannons to fend off pirates. But it had nothing to protect it from the fierce weather off a particularly bleak stretch of inhospitable African coast, and it sank 500 years ago.
Now it has been found, stumbled upon by De Beers geologists prospecting for diamonds off Namibia....... More ►
BBC ≫ Ivorian ex-rebels begin to disarm
The former rebels in Ivory Coast who still control the northern half of the country have started to disarm with a ceremony involving 1,000 fighters.
After several false starts, the New Forces rebels say over the next five months all their soldiers will head to specially prepared sites to disarm. They will then rejoin civilian life or join a new joint national army. The conflict started in September 2002 when disgruntled soldiers took control of the north after a failed coup....... More ►
Although this isn't strictly a story about 'Black people', as a dark skinned person who knows the history of this issue in our own community, I thought this was a good article to include.
Washington Post ≫ In India, Fairness Is a Growth Industry
He's the rugged type, with sculpted arm muscles. He rides a motorcycle and wears a trendy tank top, wraparound sunglasses and slicked-back hair. There's only one problem: His skin color is a few shades too dark. His fair-skinned love interest won't even accept his offer of a rose.
But in this popular Indian television ad, the protagonist is able to buy a magic cream that will change his status in life, turning his brown skin several shades lighter and causing his beloved to swoon.
The new product is called Fair and Handsome, and it's among the male skin-lightening creams that are exploding in popularity in small towns and cities across India. While such products are nothing new among Indian women, for whom fair skin has long been a symbol of affluence and status, sales of the product for men are growing at nearly 150 percent annually in emerging markets, according to a recent study by Ernst & Young.
'It's all lower-middle-class men who want the product now,' said Ajay Gupta, 52, a pharmacist, who said the creams often sell out. 'What it really means is that the young and up-and-coming Indian male wants to look fair and therefore rich. He wants to be smart and good. The cream is now part of many men's grooming routine and very popular at barbershops...... More ►
In America the high price of food mostly means a few grumbles and maybe substituting name brands for generics. In Haiti it's a different story.
The Root ≫ How food riots in Haiti crashed my sister's wedding
At about the same time my little sister was getting married three weeks ago – it was a lovely beach ceremony in the Florida Keys; she was beautiful, and I was teary, having the bittersweet privilege of subbing for our dead father on the walk up the aisle – food riots were breaking out across the picture-perfect waters at her back, on the island nation of Haiti. Putting the two together – a wedding and a riot – is more than an article-opening flourish: My sister and I were both born in Queens, N.Y., but our family is Haitian, and some of the relatives in attendance barely made it off the island in time for the nuptials.
Our cousin Leslie, a priest in a small, rural town north of Port-au-Prince, was not so lucky. He got all the way to the airport before being called home. His rectory had been broken into and looted by parishioners looking for stores of rice used by a church-administered meals program. ('A church!' some of the older ladies tut-tutted at the rehearsal dinner, as if the building's powers of sanctuary should have included the ability to bar hunger and desperation at the door.)...... More ►
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LATimes ≫ Love, death and questions in the South's bloodiest prison
The lovers married on Feb. 5, 1972 -- he was 23, she was just 16. Two months later, the bride nicknamed Teenie got a call that there had been 'an accident' at Angola, as the prison is known. She was a widow.
Miller had been stabbed 32 times and left in a prison dormitory in a pool of blood. Teenie's brother, who was also a guard, said Miller looked like he was wearing a red shirt. Horrified, he never returned to the job. Teenie soon learned that black militants stood accused of killing her husband, a random victim of what prison officials said was an inmate plot to murder a white man. She wanted the culprits to suffer and die. But unlike Miller's family, who crammed the courtrooms where the inmates were tried, she could not bear to sit and listen to the gruesome details.
'I didn't want to know,' Verrett, now 52, said as her eyes misted up. 'That was a lot to deal with at 17 years old. I trusted [the authorities] to do the right thing.'
Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, Black Panthers from New Orleans who were serving time for armed robberies, were convicted of Miller's murder. The widow did her best to go on, moving to Jeanerette, an industrial town in the heart of Cajun country about two hours south of the prison. Two years later, she married Dean Verrett, who loved her despite her feelings for Miller, and they had three children. She began working at a beauty parlor, where she still works today.
Then 2 1/2 years ago, Billie Mizell, a legal investigator and fledgling author, showed up at Verrett's home near the banks of the Bayou Teche. She said she wanted to talk about Miller's murder.
What Mizell told Verrett stunned her. A bloody fingerprint found at the scene did not match Woodfox or Wallace. There was never any physical evidence linking them to the crime....... More ►
LATimes ≫ Aging members of the Businessmen -- precursors of the Bloods and Crips -- want peace
Their name, the Businessmen, was derived from the slang term 'taking care of business.' They were among several dominant African American gangs -- the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Del Vikings -- in the early 1960s in the neighborhood then known as South-Central: the precursors to the Bloods and the Crips.
Now, the Businessmen of South Park have traded their fedoras for bifocals, and their whiskers are gray. But they're together again -- not to fight or drink but to try to unravel what they say is their own destructive legacy. They are tormented by the thought that their early gang activity begot increasingly violent generations of gangs. 'We had a hand in making it like this,' said Carter Spikes, 61. 'Now we are doing what we can to make things right.'...... More ►
NYTimes ≫ Racial Disparities Found to Persist as Drug Arrests Rise
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the drug war, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.
In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980. More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data. Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: adult black males are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to the Human Rights Watch report....... More ►
NYTimes (City Room blog) ≫ Bell Protesters Block Traffic Across City
Several hundred protesters briefly shut down traffic at entrances to the Queensboro Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge and the Holland Tunnel and Queens-Midtown Tunnel this afternoon as part of a coordinated series of protests over the acquittal of three New York City police detectives in the fatal shooting of Sean Bell in 2006.
The Rev. Al Sharpton, who coordinated the protests, was among dozens and perhaps hundreds of people who were arrested by the police — nearly all of them in an orderly fashion — for blocking traffic. The protesters expressed outrage over a Queens judge’s decision on April 25 to acquit the three detectives — Michael Oliver, Gescard F. Isnora and Marc Cooper — over the November 2006 death of Mr. Bell, who died in a hail of police bullets outside a nightclub in Jamaica, Queens, hours before he was to have been married....... More ►
ODDS AND ENDS
SOUL FOOD YUM!!! Uncle Don's Double Mustard Greens & Roasted Yam Soup.
This diary hits the nail on the head on this issue. It's important but not 42% of all political news coverage important.
The Endless, Self-Referential Circle......More ►
┗ by Granny Doc
Operation Anti-Chaos: The Narrative on "White Voters" Is Fiction......More ►
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My continued love affair with StormBear
Black History: Emancipation......More ►
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Do some Alternative Schools have a racist agenda for leaving some kids behind?......More ►
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